This Website Is Advertising "Black Girl Magic" Tees on White Models

"Black girl magic" is a phrase that celebrates all the cool shit black women do, and it's become a rallying cry for women of color from Amandla Stenberg to Solange — even former president Barack Obama has weighed in on the phenomenon. It's inevitable that a phrase this close to people's hearts would eventually end up on a T-shirt. But Twitter has noticed something very...interesting about one online retailer's "black girl magic" tees — namely, they're being advertised on white models.

YouTube beauty guru Jackie Aina was the first to call this out in a Tweet posted Tuesday morning, Yahoo Style reports.

The tweet shows two "black girl magic" tees, both on white models. Aina didn't name the retailer responsible for this...oddity, but the images are from zazzle.com, a website that sells user-created designs. And a quick search shows that these two examples aren't the only ones.

In case you think your eyes deceive you, nope, that is actually several "BGM" tees, one "Melanin & Coconut Oil & Hips & Magic" tee, and one with a Maxine Waters quote, "I am a strong black woman [...] and I'm not going anywhere." All on white or Asian models. Elsewhere, a blonde model shows off a "Melanin and Mascara" sweatshirt. Jesus, take the wheel.

Naturally, Twitter has a whole lot to say about this, and Aina's thread is now a treasure trove of reaction gifs to use whenever the world is just too much.

Of course, some users are pointing out that zazzle.com may not be directly responsible for this. The website lets users design their own T-shirts and also presumably choose which stock model photos to show those designs on. Still, we have to wonder how diverse Zazzle's selection of stock models is — obvious missteps such as the "Black Queen" tee below could have been avoided if there were more black models for users to choose from. And the apparent lack of oversight has gotten Zazzle in hot water before — you may remember a notorious incident in 2011, when the site came under fire for selling girls' T-shirts that read "Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels."

It's also worth unpacking what, exactly, upsets people about these images. Unlike the "Black Lives Matter" movement, which can and should be embraced by people of color and their non-POC allies, "black girl magic" is more personal than that. It's about black women coming together to celebrate themselves, embracing their joy, creativity, and beauty, as well as resisting against a mainstream society that devalues black women. Just read Solange's moving Teen Vogue interview with Amandla Stenberg, where Solo celebrates "connecting as two non-conforming black girls [...], dancing through life while coloring outside every line, [and] sprinkling black girl magic in every crevice of the universe." Black girl magic is one of those things that's not really for white people, and that's OK.

It's also worth pointing out that not every Zazzle user gets it wrong. It took a bit of scrolling, but we did find several examples of sellers using a black model for their tees, and they are glorious. Hopefully, this misstep will help companies understand why it behooves them to make their model lineups as diverse as possible.